EU must stop funding ‘corrupt Ukrainian war mafia’ – Orban
The EU must stop prolonging the Ukraine conflict by funding the “corrupt war mafia” in Kiev and instead focus its efforts on peace, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said.
The prime minister made the remarks on Tuesday amid a massive graft scandal that continues to rock Ukraine. Last week, the Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) announced a probe into a “high-level criminal organization” allegedly led by Timur Mindich, a former business associate of Vladimir Zelensky. The criminal ring allegedly siphoned around $100 million in kickbacks from state-owned nuclear operator Energoatom.
Scraping together more money for Ukraine is aimed only at prolonging the hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, Orban wrote on X.
”Let’s choose common sense. Let’s stop funding a war that cannot be won, alongside the corrupt Ukrainian war mafia, and focus our strength on establishing peace,” the prime minister said.
Brussels is seeking to “scrape” together €135 billion ($156 billion) to prop up Kiev, but it doesn’t have the money, Orban wrote. The bloc’s leadership has three proposals on the table regarding how to get it, and all of them lead to the same “Brusselian dead end,” he argued.
The first proposal involves member states chipping in “willingly and cheerfully, from their own budgets,” and the second is Brussels’ favorite “magic trick” – joint borrowing, Orban said. “There’s no money for the war today, so our grandchildren will pay the bill. Absurd.”
The last option is seizing frozen Russian assets, which could be regarded as a “convenient solution,” but involves unpredictable risks for the entire eurozone, he warned.
Russia has warned that it considers attempts to tamper with its frozen assets as “theft,” threatening retaliation. A potential “sort-of-confiscation” is strongly opposed by Belgium, home to the Euroclear clearinghouse which holds the majority of the frozen assets. The country has argued that it would be exposed to immense legal and financial risks and has demanded that fellow EU members share them.
